The present invention relates to apparatus for producing dough pieces, and more particularly, high volume apparatus for producing dough pieces cut from extruded dough.
In the baking industry there are continuous technological efforts to increase the rate of product flow through the dough forming, baking, and packaging operations of the manufacturing process.
The dough pieces for certain baked products are formed by the wire cut method. In this operation, dough is extruded from a horizontally oriented die and sections of the dough are sliced off by a thin moving wire.
The speed of the baking and packaging operations have advanced to the point where the commercially available wire cut machines cannot supply dough pieces at a rate sufficient to match those operations. While the extrusion rate can be increased considerably without difficulty, there is a practical limit to the speed at which the cutting wire will efficiently form dough pieces.
A wire cut machine deposits dough pieces onto a conveyor belt in a series of parallel rows or columns. The normal speed of operation of these machines is between 150 and 180 pieces per minute for each line deposited on the conveyor.
At these speeds, the wire cuts cleanly through the extruding dough without transferring a significant amount of energy to the piece cut off. The pieces fall vertically onto the conveyor in a consistent uniform pattern. When these machines run at speeds greater than 180 pieces per minute, the pattern is disrupted in two ways. At these high speeds the machine begins to vibrate and this effects the placement of the dough pieces. Also, the wire, because of its speed, transfers sufficient energy into the pieces to throw the pieces horizontally in an unpredictable manner. In addition, when the dough contains particles such as chocolate chips, the energy transferred to the pieces varies according to the number and location of the particles which are struck by the wire as it passes through the extrusion.
As a result of this unpredictable horizontal displacement of the dough pieces, the dough pieces are deposited on the conveyor in an irregular pattern which effects the baking and packaging operations. Modern efficient automated packaging machinery requires that the baked articles be arranged in well defined rows. Also, wire cut dough pieces generally spread during baking. Therefore, dough pieces which are too close together fuse into one large irregular baked piece and must be discarded. Modern packaging methods also require that the dough pieces be uniform in size so as to produce baked products of uniform size and weight which can be processed by automatic machinery.